By Rick Atkinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 7, 2004; Page A01

First of three articles

At 7:30 a.m. on March 26, 2003, I slipped into the command post tent of the 101st Airborne Division to find the commander, Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, on the telephone. His face was drawn, as if he had slept poorly. Two days of appalling weather had virtually halted the U.S. Army's drive toward Baghdad, including the 101st, which was now trying to gather itself in a miserable swatch of Iraqi desert called Forward Operating Base Shell, 30 miles southwest of Najaf. Dust lay drifted in windrows inside every tent, and the division's 260 helicopters looked like they had been dipped in milk chocolate.

Worse yet, Iraqi Fedayeen irregulars continued to attack U.S. forces with fanatical and unexpected intensity. As Petraeus finished his call, an intelligence officer whispered to me that orders had come down overnight banning the term "Fedayeen," which means "men who sacrifice themselves for a cause," because it ostensibly invested them with too much dignity. They were to be referred to as "paramilitaries," an edict most soldiers duly ignored.

Petraeus hung up and ordered an aide to get his Humvee ready for a trip to the V Corps command post 20 miles to the north. He pushed back from the table, snapped the chin strap on his helmet, and shrugged on his flak vest. "Want to step outside and chat for a minute?" he asked.

We stood 15 feet beyond the tent flap. I blinked at the swirling dust, and felt grit between my molars. When Petraeus turned to face me, I was alarmed to see how troubled his blue eyes were. "This thing is turning [bad]," he said. "The 3 ID" -- the 3rd Infantry Division, fighting just ahead of the 101st around Najaf -- "is in danger of running out of food and water. They lost two Abrams and a Bradley last night, although they got the crews out. The corps commander sounds tired."

A scheme to parachute the 82nd Airborne Division into the Karbala Gap -- the Army's preferred gateway to Baghdad -- had evaporated. Two battalions had their jump gear rigged and ready at Kuwait International Airport, but the proposed drop zone was discovered to be perilously rocky; also, it was uncertain that ground reinforcements would reach the paratroops in time to forestall substantial casualties. Instead, the 82nd would be used to secure besieged supply routes in southern Iraq.

The dust was blinding. I had misplaced my goggles and it was difficult to see without squinting hard. I suggested that we move behind his small tent, which was adjacent to the command post, but when dust pursued us there we stepped inside.

Petraeus noted that because of Turkey's opposition, the Pentagon had finally abandoned all hope of pushing the 4th Infantry Division into northern Iraq through Turkey. The flotilla of ships carrying the division equipment would sail from the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal, around the Arabian Peninsula, and up the Persian Gulf. "You know how long that will take," Petraeus said.

U.S. forces had yet to encounter the Republican Guard, but Iraqi irregulars seemed much more aggressive than anticipated and the Shiite south, contrary to expectations, had hardly welcomed the invaders as liberators. The battlefield was what soldiers call nonlinear, with only a vague distinction between the front and the rear.

"No one really saw this coming, did they?" I said.

"No," he replied. No prewar estimates had anticipated a defense of Najaf by Iraqi regular army or Republican Guard troops, nor did those estimates predict stiff resistance from paramilitary forces. "We did worst-case scenarios, where the enemy really put up a fight, but no one took it very seriously. We need to get lucky. The CIA really needs to pull one out."

For the first time since the war began on March 20, it was evident that senior battlefield generals believed that the campaign was developing in unexpected and disturbing ways. Capturing or killing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein seemed a wan hope at the moment, and I said as much. Petraeus agreed. "Hell, we couldn't find Noriega for four days in a country that we owned," he said, referring to the frustrating hunt for the strongman Manuel Antonio Noriega in Panama in 1989.

"It's possible, even probable that we'll hold in place for a while," he continued. "The original timeline called for us to be at this point in 47 days, so we're here far ahead of schedule in that sense."

"Do the Iraqis have the ability to counterattack?" I asked.

"They do. Their losses would be very high. But we're in danger of running out of artillery ammunition."

Resupply was difficult because of the weather and insecure convoy routes. One Marine unit supposedly was down to a day's supply of food. The 3rd Infantry Division had ample fuel, but had not been resupplied with food or water since leaving Kuwait and was "black" -- dangerously low -- on those necessities, as well as on ammunition. The division on the previous day had reported prolonged, ferocious combat, with nearly a thousand Iraqis believed killed in the Euphrates River valley around Najaf. As for the 101st, with its helicopters grounded by bad weather, the division was largely immobile because many of the trucks needed for transport had yet to arrive in Kuwait.

The weather, Petraeus said, was "about as nasty as anything I've ever seen." He gave a fleeting smile. "At least, it's not cold."

He hooked his thumbs into his flak vest and adjusted the weight on his shoulders. "Tell me how this ends," he said. "Eight years and eight divisions?" The allusion was to advice supposedly given the White House in the early 1950s by a senior Army strategist upon being asked what it would take to prop up French forces in South Vietnam. Petraeus's grin suggested the comment was more droll quip than historical assertion.

"You're really into something now," Petraeus added, as he pushed through the tent flap toward his Humvee.

"So are you," I said.

That brief episode in the Iraqi desert marked a key moment in the making of a combat general. Then 50 years old, Petraeus belonged to a small brotherhood of senior commanders who first joined the service at the nadir of the Vietnam War, then endured a battered and disheartened postwar military, and now had inherited leadership of the armed forces when the nation seemed to need its Army more than at any time since World War II. After a quarter-century of keeping faith and learning the art of command, their hour had come around -- in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and on whatever battlefields seemed sure to follow.

Although he had been a soldier since reporting to West Point at age 17 in July 1970, and had served in Haiti and Bosnia, Petraeus had never seen combat before. As an embedded reporter who spent virtually all day, every day at his elbow, I was able to witness the anxieties and perturbations, the satisfactions and enormous responsibilities of commanding 17,000 troops under fire. Even for someone who had spent a lifetime around the U.S. Army -- my father was a career officer -- this vantage point was uniquely intimate. I watched Petraeus and his subordinates wrestle with a thousand tactical conundrums, from landing helicopters in a dust bowl to capturing several large cities.

I also watched them wrestle with the strategic implications of the 21st-century military they now commanded, an expeditionary force that darts from one brush-fire war to another, safeguarding American interests around the globe. The task seemed both monumental and perpetual, and that pesky query Petraeus first posed in the swirling dust on March 26 became a private joke between us: "Tell me how this ends."

"The devil is in the details," Petraeus often observed, and his own biography was both unusual and preparatory for the role of a modern major general. His father, Sixtus Petraeus, a Dutch sea captain, had taken refuge in New York when World War II began, then married a Brooklyn woman whom he met at the Seamen's Church Institute. After commanding a Liberty ship through the war, the elder Petraeus eventually gave up sea duty to work for a New York power company. He settled in Cornwall, a few miles north of the U.S. Military Academy, where his son graduated near the top of the class of 1974. The young officer married Holly Knowlton, daughter of West Point's superintendent.

"A striver to the max, Dave was always 'going for it' in sports, academics, leadership, and even his social life," the academy yearbook observed. Even when he was merely an infantry captain, his confidence and expanding résumé led one officer to dub him "Superman." Over the next two decades, he alternated command and staff assignments with duty as an aide to several of the Army's most prominent four-star generals: John R. Galvin, Carl E. Vuono and Henry H. Shelton when they were, respectively, NATO supreme commander, Army chief of staff and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Along the way he earned a doctorate in international relations from Princeton University. His dissertation, "The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam," examined the caution that seized the high command after that catastrophe.

A soccer player and expert skier at West Point, Petraeus in middle age remained obsessive about what he called the p.t. -- physical training -- culture. When he was a brigade commander in the 82nd Airborne Division, according to a superior, his competitive ardor sometimes caused him "to drive young officers half his age into the ground like tent pegs." Recently he had run an Army 10-mile race in under 64 minutes. A staff officer told me that at Fort Campbell, Ky., home post for the 101st, "If anyone beats him in the shorter runs, four miles or so, he takes them out for 10 miles and smokes them."

While skydiving several years ago, he had survived the abrupt collapse of a parachute 60 feet up; his shattered pelvis had been reassembled with a plate and long screws. At 5 feet 9 and 155 pounds, Petraeus reminded me of George Bernard Shaw's description of Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery: "an intensely compacted hank of steel wire."

Perhaps the most remarkable test of his luck and physical rigor came on Sept. 21, 1991. Shortly after taking command of a battalion in the 101st, Petraeus was watching an infantry squad practice assaulting a bunker with live grenades and ammunition. Forty yards away, a rifleman tripped and fell, hard. Petraeus never saw the muzzle flash. The M-16 round struck just above the "A" in his uniform name tag on the right side of his chest, and blew through his back. Had it hit above the "A" in "U.S. Army," on the left side over his heart, he would have been dead before he hit the ground.

He staggered back and collapsed. Standing next to him was Brig. Gen. Jack Keane, the assistant division commander, who by 2003 had become the Army's four-star vice chief of staff.

"Dave, you've been shot," Keane told him. "I want you to keep talking. You know what's going on here, David. I don't want you to go into shock."

Keane later described the day for me. "He was getting weaker, you could see that. He said, 'I'm gonna be okay. I'll stay with it.' We got him to the hospital at Campbell and they jammed a chest tube in. It's excruciating. Normally a guy screams and his body comes right off the table. All Petraeus did was grunt a little bit. His body didn't even move. The surgeon told me, 'That's the toughest guy I ever had my hands on.' "

A medevac helicopter flew Petraeus, with Keane at his side, to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, 60 miles away. "It was a Saturday and I was afraid the top guys wouldn't be on duty. I had them call ahead to make sure their best thoracic surgeon was available," Keane recalled. "We got off the helicopter and there's this guy they'd called off the links, still in his golf outfit, pastel colors and everything." It was Dr. Bill Frist, who a decade later would become majority leader of the U.S. Senate. More than five hours of surgery followed.

"Petraeus recuperated at the Fort Campbell hospital," Keane continued, "and he was driving the hospital commander crazy, trying to convince the doctors to discharge him. He said, 'I am not the norm. I'm ready to get out of here and I'm ready to prove it to you.' He had them pull the tubes out of his arm. Then he hopped out of bed and did 50 push-ups. They let him go home."

After taking command of the 101st during the summer of 2002, Petraeus had been preoccupied with 1003 Victor, code name for the U.S. military's secret plan for conquering Iraq. But because of the political and diplomatic byplay in Washington over the winter, the 101st did not receive a formal deployment order until Feb. 6, 2003.

The commander's immediate challenge was not the conquest of Baghdad, but rather how to get 5,000 vehicles, 1,500 shipping containers, 17,000 soldiers and more than 200 helicopters to Kuwait by mid-March, in time for any attack on Iraq. Deployment occurred in three immensely complex phases: from Fort Campbell to Jacksonville, Fla.; Jacksonville to Kuwait City; and Kuwait City to a battle assembly area. Army logisticians called the phases fort to port, then port to port, then port to foxhole.

In one conversation in early March, as the 101st began to flood into Kuwait, Petraeus had rattled through the events of the past few weeks. To haul equipment from Fort Campbell to Jacksonville required 1,400 rail cars. The CSX rail-freight company had promised four 30-car trains each day, but as the deployment began, only three a day, on average, had arrived. "I had a conference call with the president of CSX at 11 one night," Petraeus said. "He was on the phone with some of his executives and I was trying to explain to him why it was absolutely critical that we get to the port as quickly as possible. The ships were going to be there on certain dates. There was no margin for error. As I was telling him this, he interrupted me, twice."

"Did you lose your temper?" I asked.

"No, but I told him he was contributing to the diminished combat effectiveness of my division. There was a long silence on the other end. He fixed it."

(A spokesman for CSX noted last week that the company ultimately moved 1,900 rail cars out of Fort Campbell during a two-week period in February 2003, and was applauded by Army officials for "timely assistance.")

One challenge led to others. Several hundred stevedores hired in Jacksonville insisted on long lunch breaks and hourly pauses. The military, never tolerant of goldbricking, fired them and used soldiers and nonunion supervisors to load the ships. When Washington delayed the deployment order, which among other things provided the authorization needed to pay for moving the division, Petraeus concocted an elaborate training exercise that happened to take 112 helicopters to Jacksonville; mechanics there removed the rotor blades and shrink-wrapped the fuselages in protective plastic for eventual loading onto the ships. "As an infantryman, I used to be no more interested in logistics than what you could stuff in a rucksack," he told me. "Now I know that, although the tactics aren't easy, they're relatively simple when compared to the logistics."

Petraeus had described these events with an intriguing blend of urgency and irony. Clearly he was entranced by the problem-solving nature of high command. "I find this as intellectually challenging as anything I've ever done, including graduate school and working for the chairman," he told me at Camp New Jersey in north-central Kuwait, the division command post before the war began. "It's keenly interesting and complex, and trying to understand it is usually a lot of fun. A division is a system of systems, and pulling it together is hugely complicated."

Now those cerebral musings would be tested by fire. In the days after the war began on March 20, with an effort to kill Hussein through a barrage of cruise missiles and smart bombs, the 101st had finally amassed enough combat power in Kuwait to follow the 3rd Infantry Division up the western flank of the Euphrates valley.

Petraeus's first task was to build at least two forward refueling bases so that the division's 72 AH-64 Apache helicopters could attack Iraqi defenses on the southern and western approaches to Baghdad, helping clear a path for the 3rd ID and then the rest of the 101st. A pair of Apache battalions could drink more than 60,000 gallons of fuel in a single night's attack; the Army calculated that it would burn 40 million gallons in three weeks of combat, an amount equivalent to the gasoline consumed by all Allied armies combined during the four years of World War I.

As the hour drew nearer for lunging into Iraq, I wondered what the world looked like through the commanding general's eyes. Trying to parse his moods and actions had become an intriguing exercise, although he sometimes signaled his moods by tilting his extended hand up or down.

"Everyone has the full range of emotions," he once noted. "It's just a question of how fast you get there." He was cautious and private, and his formal statements to reporters or television cameras had a stilted, calculated tone. Off-stage, he could be tart, funny and occasionally cynical, suggesting at one point that the expatriate Iraqi resistance in London was "trying to fax Saddam to death."

Occasionally he ruminated on how to strike the balance between oversight and meddling. "You think you're being inspirational," he mused after we visited his 3rd Brigade as it coiled near the border on March 21, "but most of the time you're just getting in their way." Clearly he retained a visceral awareness that 17,000 lives were in his hands, and that no occasion could be more solemn or profound for a commander than ordering young soldiers into harm's way.

"What will be required right now is a little bit of tactical patience, particularly on my part," he told me.

I knew that Petraeus, by virtue of his intellect and long experience at the elbow of senior generals, was a nuanced thinker. "A certain degree of intellectual humility is a good thing," he said. "There aren't always a helluva lot of absolutely right answers out there."

What had struck me more forcefully than Petraeus's subtle mind, however, was his description of a recent electronic war game in which an exceptionally robust "enemy" had inflicted substantial casualties on U.S. forces. "Yet at the end of the day the board is swept clean. You start over and send the electrons into battle again," Petraeus said. "In this" -- and he gestured to the little world we were about to leave behind in Kuwait -- "it's real, and real people will die."

NEXT: Lessons of battle